An N-gram Analysis of Korean English Learners' Writing

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to investigate EFL Korean learners’ use of continuous word sequences. For this, the study compiles a small corpus of Korean learners’ essays for contrastive analysis with a native learners’ corpus, and extracts lists of 4-word sequences (4-grams) from the Korean learners corpus (KLC) and the native learners corpus (LOCNESS). The analysis is based on the following: grammatical structures and functional roles. First, the result of the study from the perspective of grammatical structure is that Korean learners overuse a type of grammatical structure: Noun phrase/Pronoun + verb (I do not think). Meanwhile, native learners prefer to use the structure of Preposition + Noun phrase (at the end of). Second, from the perspective of functional roles, Korean learners overused 4-grams indicating their attitudes towards proposition (I have to study), and underuse text-organizing 4-grams (on the other hand).